Sunday, December 03, 2006

A Happy Mystery Memory

I remember the year of this picture: it's early in 1994. I had gone to the mystery bookshop across the street with my mom (we're in the back) and met three wonderful writers who were doing a mini publicity tour together. From left (if you don't recognize them) they are Dorothy Cannell, Patricia Moyes, and Joan Hess. I was thrilled to meet these women; I had read books by all of them, and they were wonderful together, answering questions, joking among themselves, being exquisitely charming.

The reason I remember so well is that I had wondered, that day, if I was pregnant. I had been extremely tired lately, and I thought that might be the cause. But I told my mother I didn't think so. Later on it turned out that I had been right the first time: my son Ian was born about 8 1/2 months later, in December of 1994.

Book One in the Undercover Dish series

Tributes to Great Writers

International Author Interviews

Mark Twain on Writing

"To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph."